The New York Review of Books

Early years[edit]

The New York Review was founded by Robert B. Silvers and Barbara Epstein, together with publisher A. Whitney Ellsworth^[5] and writer Elizabeth Hardwick. They were backed and encouraged by Epstein's husband, Jason Epstein, a vice president at Random House and editor of Vintage Books, and Hardwick's husband, poet Robert Lowell. In 1959 Hardwick had published an essay, "The Decline of Book Reviewing", in Harper's,^[6] where Silvers was then an editor, in a special issue that he edited called "Writing in America".^[7][8] Her essay was an indictment of American book reviews of the time, "light, little article[s]" that she decried as "lobotomized", passionless praise and denounced as "blandly, respectfully denying whatever vivacious interest there might be in books or in literary matters generally."^[9] The group was inspired to found a new magazine to publish thoughtful, probing, lively reviews^[10] featuring what Hardwick called "the unusual, the difficult, the lengthy, the intransigent, and above all, the interesting".^[6][11]


During the 1962–63 New York City newspaper strike, when The New York Times and several other newspapers suspended publication, Hardwick, Lowell and the Epsteins seized the chance to establish the sort of vigorous book review that Hardwick had imagined.^[12] Jason Epstein knew that book publishers would advertise their books in the new publication, since they had no other outlet for promoting new books.^[13] The group turned to the Epsteins' friend Silvers, who had been an editor at The Paris Review and was still at Harper's,^[14] to edit the publication, and Silvers asked Barbara Epstein to co-edit with him.^[8][12] She was known as the editor at Doubleday of Anne Frank's Diary of a Young Girl, among other books, and then worked at Dutton, McGraw-Hill and The Partisan Review.^[15] Silvers and Epstein sent books to "the writers we knew and admired most. ... We asked for three thousand words in three weeks in order to show what a book review should be, and practically everyone came through. No one mentioned money."^[8] The first issue of the Review was published on February 1, 1963, and sold out its printing of 100,000 copies.^[3] It prompted nearly 1,000 letters to the editors asking for the Review to continue.^[8] The New Yorker called it "surely the best first issue of any magazine ever."^[16]


Salon later commented that the list of contributors in the first issue "represented a 'shock and awe' demonstration of the intellectual firepower available for deployment in mid-century America, and, almost equally impressive, of the art of editorial networking and jawboning. This was the party everyone who was anyone wanted to attend, the Black and White Ball of the critical elite."^[17] The Review "announced the arrival of a particular sensibility ... the engaged, literary, post-war progressive intellectual, who was concerned with civil rights and feminism as well as fiction and poetry and theater.^[18] The first issue projected "a confidence in the unquestioned rightness of the liberal consensus, in the centrality of literature and its power to convey meaning, in the solubility of our problems through the application of intelligence and good will, and in the coherence and clear hierarchy of the intellectual world".^[17] After the success of the first issue, the editors assembled a second issue to demonstrate that "the Review was not a one-shot affair".^[8] The founders then collected investments from a circle of friends and acquaintances, and Ellsworth joined as publisher.^[8][19] The Review began regular biweekly publication in November 1963.^[20]